Adorazione dei Magi

Around 1638 Carthusian monks near Jerez de la Frontera, in southern Spain, commissioned Zurbaran to fill a towering altarpiece for their monastery church. This Adoration was one of about a dozen canvases made for it, set high on the structure where the eye had to climb to reach it. That is part of why the kings are so solid and close-pressed and the fabrics so heavy, since Zurbaran painted for a fixed viewpoint far below. The oldest king kneels bare-headed before the child while the others wait with their gold, and the whole thing carries the quiet, grave weight the Carthusians, an order of near-total silence, would have wanted. It did not stay put. French troops looted the monastery during the Peninsular War early in the next century, and Spain's dissolution of the monasteries in 1835 scattered the set for good. Three of the panels ended up here in Grenoble.